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This article by Barbara Fox was prepared for the June 26, 2002 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.

Union Organizer

A trade union office added one person, needed to expand

in space, and moved four blocks. The four-person international area

office of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal

Employees (AFSCME) moved from 1254 Whitehorse-Mercerville Road to

1,924 square feet on Whitehorse Road. Barry Blackwell of Commercial

Property Network represented the union in this expansion.

That may not sound like an exciting tale, but the man behind this

move has quite a story. Leamon Hood, 65, started with the union in

1964 in his home city of Atlanta, Georgia, where he was the son of

a laborer and worked as a janitor in the public schools and a treatment

plant operator.

"Working conditions for everybody and blacks in particular were

horrendous at that time," says Hood. "I was making $48 every

two weeks. People considered to be doing much better were making $40

a week. Job descriptions were written for white people already in

the school system and black people didn’t have any chance to be a

first line supervisor."

Hood began to hear about unions from out-of-state seminary students

who had night jobs. They brought him information about the fundamental

principles of fair and equal treatment for workers.

"I was one of the initiating organizers of school custodians in

Atlantic public schools. We didn’t know professional organizers existed,"

he remembers. "The AFL-CIO gave us cards, put us in touch with

AFSCME and AFSCME allowed us to affiliate with them."

"By the mid to late ’60s I was marching, but by then I was in

New York, marching at Central Park and at the United Nations helping

to organize the union at Willowbrook State School." The union

sent him to training for how to be a staff representative and after

three years he was assigned to Memphis, Tennessee. It was two years

after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and there was

plenty of work to do in Memphis.

"Because they had a union that had been organized under a social

environment they had little or no idea about what a union was about,"

he says. "Negotiating contracts, handling grievances, and a steward

structure — all these were almost foreign to them."

Hood’s current job is to provide technical support services to councils

in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. The four AFSCME councils

in New Jersey collectively have 30,000 members. The council in Trenton

on South Broad Street is primarily a lobbying group, and it also works

with the state and local government to do contract negotiations, political

and legislative lobbying, and handling grievances. Council No. 73

is in Mercerville and represents Central Jersey workers in daycare,

city and county government, park authorities, and state hospitals.

Other councils are in north and south Jersey, and an independent local

in Newark, not affiliated with any council, represents an additional

12,000 members.

"As an international office, we also represent people in Puerto

Rico and the Panama Canal," says Hood. "In Puerto Rico, we

have 1.3 million members and affiliates of local groups.

His services include ancillary assistance and technical advice, budget

research, and leadership training. He handles political and legislative

matters, local, state, and federal laws, initiatives and issues, and

preparation for contract negotiations. Mostly he works for new local

councils, but if requested he also provides assistance for affiliate

organizations.

Hood never went to college, but now he lectures on university campuses.

He is nearly ready to retire, "but I still find this job interesting."

He notes that it is hard for today’s young people to understand the

difficulties of the 1960s and 1970s. They are impatient. But then

he was just as impatient at that age. "I was ignorant enough to

believe," says Hood, "that we could have made a lot of better

changes if the old folks hadn’t been so slow."